To my friends who have been following me on the "Progressive Pulse" blog,

For a number of reasons, I have decided to permanently move my posts to a Substack account. For a time, I had tried to maintain this blog and the Substack by posting the same articles in both, but it became clear that, with much greater traffic on Substack, it made sense, because of my limited time, to focus on Substack.

Please check out my posts on Substack at  https://georgevlasits.substack.com/ and , if you like what you see, you can subscribe for free. Hopefully you will find it of greater value than the cost.

George Vlasits 

Bits and Pieces – July 22, 2023 - "American Sniper"

After a short hiatus, I’m hoping to get back to posting on a regular basis. To start I’m going to put together short commentaries on what’s in the news, and, more importantly what’s not in the main stream media, while I work on longer analytic posts.

Today’s edition follows.

A while back I wrote a piece on gun control titled “It’s Not the Guns, It’s Us. The gist of the post was that the US is and has always been a violent society, from the original settlers’ genocide of native people, through slavery, and right down to our culture today. (I’ve reposted it below, for those who missed it the first time around.)

So I was not at all surprised to read about this in “War Made Invisible” by Norman Solomon. The top grossing movie in 2014 was American Sniper, which according to the NYT, was “one of the 10 most influential films of the decade”. “One of the key themes of American Sniper is the strong culture of machismo—the masculine-oriented aggressiveness, competitiveness, and glamorization of danger—found in the U.S. military”.

Reflect for a moment on how that film might have affected a teenage boy (note that we are always talking about male perpetrators when shootings take place) who, as an adult ten or twelve years later, has access to a weapon which could replicate the “heroic” actions of the movie character. Killing “bad guys” is, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, as American as cherry pie. Who gets to determine who the “bad guys” are? Why not me?

January 27, 2023 – It’s Not the Guns, It’s Us

Like many of my fellow Americans, when I woke up Tuesday morning to the reports of another horrific mass murder in California, there was little emotional response, no feeling that “we’ve got to do something, anything, to stop this slaughter.” I, like too many others, have become desensitized, numbed by what has become an all-too-common event.

“We’re still trying to understand exactly what happened and why, but it’s just incredibly, incredibly tragic,” said state Sen. Josh Becker, who represents the area. Tragic yes; unexpected, no.

By the next day the political response was focusing, as it always does after these tragedies, on gun control. But wait a minute, doesn’t California, which has seen 3 mass shootings in the last week or so, have a mandatory waiting period for the purchase of firearms? Doesn’t the state ban assault rifles? Didn’t the legislature adopt a “red flag” law that allows guns to be seized from people believed to be a threat to themselves or others? And haven’t California voters overwhelmingly approved limiting the number of bullets allowed in a gun’s magazine? And yet …

Don’t get me wrong. I’m totally in favor of gun control. In my perfect world, we wouldn’t even allow guns for hunting. At least against a hunter with a bow and arrow, the deer would have a chance. But we don’t live in that perfect world. We live in the United States of America, where violence is accepted as the solution to all problems, in many cases the only solution. It’s a fact, as H Rap Brown quipped, that “violence is as American as cherry pie”.

Think about it. The country was settled by violence, as the English immigrants did all they could to exterminate the native peoples and expropriate their land, rounding up the few that weren’t killed and forcing them onto reservations (later making movies about how the savages were killed by the heroic cavalry coming to the rescue of peaceful white farmers).

The US grew into a powerful industrial society by forcefully enslaving millions of Africans and exploiting their labor. What is more violent than slavery? And, country expanded its borders by waging war against its neighbor to the south, referring to Manifest Destiny as its justification. It’s okay to kill when God’s on your side.

American society has glorified war during its entire history. Many of its early leaders where military heroes; its national anthem is about a war – “and the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air…” The statutes of its heroes, more often than not, are of generals (until recently even Confederate generals, who were traitors to the Union).

Although it managed to avoid having a large standing army until just after WW II (due in large part to very weak neighbors and two oceans), it relied on a growing internal force to “keep the peace” domestically by applying the violence of the state to protect the interests of the wealthy. And, since WW II, it has maintained the world’s largest military, with a budget greater than combined total of the next 11 largest military budgets in the world.

Today, the US government spends the American people’s hard-earned money to extend Its military reach to every corner of the world so that it can take out (the nice way to say kill) those forces (that is, human beings) it deems the enemy almost anywhere (along with an occasional wedding party), while at the same time condemning other countries that have used force just outside their borders claiming it is necessary to guarantee their national security.

Our “civilization” continues to glorify war and gratuitous violence. Its media is filled to the brim with violence, celebrating death and destruction in too many ways to even count. Go to the movies, watch TV, play video games, etc., it’s all the same. And it’s been that way all of my 80 years on this planet, although it seems to be even more pervasive today than it was when I was a kid.

Our society’s response to problems and conflicts, both home and abroad is violence. Even when dealing with social problems in a supposedly non-violent way, we use violent terms, an example being the War on Poverty. Is it any wonder that ordinary Americans, particularly in time of personal crises see violence, even random violence, as the normal response.

To “protect” our citizens at home we have a militarized police force, generously funded with resources, not to help people, but to kill them (or, in a gentler form of violence, to lock them in cages). And kill people they do. The year 2022 was the deadliest year on record in the United States for fatalities at the hands of law enforcement. According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database law enforcement officers shot and killed 1,096 people last year. As I write, the news is filled with reports of another murder by the people who are supposed to protect us.  These generously fund police departments are actually occupying armies, using their resources to keep people in line, especially poor people of color whose needs are not being funded.

Case and point. While there is no end to funding for more police and more weapons, universal healthcare can wait (forever?). The governor of California reported that, while visiting a man in the hospital, whose leg had been shattered by the gunfire during the latest mass shooting, he was informed that the victim was hoping to leave quickly to avoid high medical bills. The patient’s mother and son arrived later and told Gov. Newsom they were "worried he's going to lose his job at a warehouse the next day unless he can go back to work."

So there we have it. As our country and the world face the interrelated crises of global warming, runaway inequality, the COVID pandemic (and who knows how many more are waiting in the wings), a real threat of escalation to nuclear war, and the attacks from the extreme right on democracy, instead of devoting the resources needed to provide for the people of our country and our larger community, the world, we are pumping just under $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s one trillion) into the military and billions more into the police.

Until we can begin to deal with the violence that permeates our society, gun control will have only minor effects on the murder rates (both mass and individual) in the US. The glorification of violence and guns in the US has resulted firearms becoming the #1 cause of death among children 1-19 years of age. One more aspect of the policrisis we face.

 

Sanders on global warming and the climate crises

 

I've been beset by a number of personal issues lately and unable to work on blog articles. Hope to get back soon. In place of my rants, I've copied a stirring op/ed piece on the climate crisis by one of our heroes, Senator Bernie Sanders. This crisis is not something coming down the road, but one that is here for hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings. And it is intimately connected to other crises affecting us all, from a huge and growing crisis of migrants clamoring to escape its effects to feeding the extreme rightwing (or should I say fascist) movements in their attack on democratic values. Everything, as it turns out, is connected, so I think it's accurate to talk about the climate crises, or as one of my favorite writers, Adam Tooze, posits, the climate polycrisis.

This year is set to be the hottest in history. Congress must act now.
If there is not bold, immediate action to address the climate crisis, the quality of life that we are leaving our kids is very much in question

Bernie Sanders
Fri 7 July 2023

The last eight years have been the eight hottest on record. This year is on track to be the hottest year in recorded history, and this Fourth of July might have been the hottest day in the past 125,000 years.

Climate change is ravaging the planet. We are now seeing floods, droughts, extreme weather disturbances and wild fires causing unprecedented damage. If there is not bold, immediate and united action by governments throughout the world, the quality of life that we are leaving our kids and future generations is very much in question.

In the short term, we will be looking at more melting of the Arctic ice caps, rising sea levels and increased flooding. We will experience more drought and a decrease in food production. We will see major damage caused by intense storms, tornadoes and other extreme weather disturbances. We will see a decline in economic activity and the migration of millions of people as a result of water shortages. We will see a major disruption in all forms of marine life as a result of warming sea water and the acidification of the oceans.

Over last few weeks we’ve gotten a glimpse of what this dystopian future could look like. The unprecedented forest fires in Quebec, preceded by massive fires in Nova Scotia, British Columbia and Alberta, have resulted in dangerously unhealthy air all across the United States. New York, Washington DC, Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and other cities have reported some of their worst air quality levels ever as people with chronic illness have been forced to remain indoors. Meanwhile, during this same period, Texas has experienced a record-breaking heat wave. In Corpus Christi the heat index, a measure of temperature combined with humidity, reached 125F – close to the level at which humans are able to survive.

As a result of long-standing drought six western states that rely on water from the Colorado River have recently agreed to dramatically cut their water use. That river, which provides water for 40 million people and a $5 trillion-a-year agricultural industry, is drying up. The state of Arizona recently restricted future home-building in the Phoenix area due to a lack of groundwater, based on projections showing that wells will run dry under existing conditions.

Needless to say, climate change is not just an American issue. Despite the frightening impact of climate change on the United States, highly populated Asian countries are facing even worse challenges. Sea levels on China’s coastline have hit their highest on record for the second year in a row, rising more quickly than the global average. China’s coastal areas are home to approximately 45% of the country’s population of about 1.4 billion people, and contribute to over half of the country’s economic output. Major cities like Shanghai, Tianjin and Shenzhen are all located along the Chinese coast and could face catastrophic flooding in years to come – creating havoc with the entire Chinese economy.

Last year, India experienced a searing heat wave, during which parts of the country reached more than 120F. In 2022, India experienced its hottest April in 122 years and its hottest March on record. It experienced extreme weather on 242 out of 273 days between January and October 2022. Long-term projections indicate that Indian heat waves could cross the survivability limit for a healthy human resting in the shade by 2050. The impact of these continued heat waves will not only result in more deaths and disease in India but will increase poverty as a result of reduced economic output.

From June to October 2022, heavy rainfall in Pakistan caused flooding and landslides at a rate nearly 10 times the national 30-year average. The floods affected nearly 33 million people, damaged 4.4 million acres of agricultural land and killed 800,000 livestock. In the aftermath, rising food prices exacerbated already stressed levels of hunger and malnutrition in the country. The number of people experiencing severe hunger has more than doubled since the floods hit in June: today, 14.6 million people are experiencing severe hunger in Pakistan and the malnutrition rates are dire.

Climate change is taking a major human, economic, and environmental toll in Europe, the fastest warming continent of the world. The year 2022 was marked by extreme heat, drought, and wildfires. Based on country data submitted so far, it is estimated that at least 15,000 people died in Western Europe alone specifically due to the heat in 2022. Among those, more than 4,600 deaths in Spain, more than 1,000 in Portugal, more than 3,200 in the United Kingdom, and around 4,500 people died in Germany as a result of extreme heat.

As devastating as climate change has been for the United States, Europe, China and other developed countries, its impact is even worse for the poorest countries on earth who lack the resources to protect their inhabitants from the growing hunger, disease and migrations that droughts and floods are causing. Here are a few examples as reported by the UN World Food Program:

South Sudan’s temperatures are increasing at two and half times the global average. This has resulted in extreme weather events including four consecutive years of flooding that have left half the country underwater. The unprecedented flooding has swallowed large swathes of the country while other parts are grappling with devastating drought. Today, some 64% of the country’s population (7.7 million people out of 12 million total) are experiencing severe hunger.

In February of 2022, Madagascar was hit with four tropical cyclones. These storms destroyed infrastructure, decimated rice crops and left over 270,000 people in urgent need of food. Today, nearly 2 million people in Madagascar are experiencing hunger and are in need of humanitarian assistance

In Somalia, there is no end in sight to the drought in that extremely poor country. Somalia has experienced five failed rainy seasons, drying up crops and killing livestock. This has resulted in 6.5 million people facing crisis levels of hunger.

It is no great secret that human beings are not particularly anxious to address painful realities – especially when it requires taking on powerful special interests like the fossil fuel industry. This time we must.

Our Earth is warming rapidly. We see this every day in every part of the world.

Drought, floods, forest fires and extreme weather disturbances are increasing. We see this every day in every part of the world.

Hunger, disease and human migrations are increasing. We see this every day in every part of the world.

Instead of denying this obvious reality, instead of doing the bidding of oil and coal companies, instead of fomenting a new cold war with China, members of Congress must develop an unprecedented sense of urgency about this global crisis. We must bring the world together NOW to address this existential threat. Failure to act will doom future generations to a very uncertain future. For the sake of our common humanity we cannot allow that to happen.

What the "Tale of Two Disasters" reveals about Western "Civilization"

The two maritime tragedies in recent days could barely be more different. Likewise the response of governments in the Global North and the coverage in the main stream media.

In the first case, it was poor migrants from the Global South…

“Last Wednesday, a fishing trawler carrying more than 700 migrants primarily from Egypt, Syria and Pakistan went down off the coast of Greece, in one of the worst such disasters in more than a decade. Though the death toll is officially at 81, Greek authorities have only counted 104 survivors. Their testimony suggests all the women and children aboard perished. By some estimates, more than 300 Pakistani nationals on the boat died, with one account alleging many were forced to stay below deck in the hold as the ship capsized and sank.

……

“Pakistan is in the middle of a devastating economic crisis, with the rate of inflation at a 50-year high, food shortages, energy blackouts and mounting unemployment. The conditions have compelled numerous people, especially among the poor, to seek a better life abroad.

“The desperate situation has led to the mushrooming growth of people smugglers in Pakistan,” wrote Zahid Shahab Ahmed, a senior research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization in Australia. “In exchange for large sums of money, they offer people transportation, fake documentation and other resources for a swift departure from the country.”

“Shocking as it is, this disaster in the Mediterranean is all too familiar to a global public largely numb to the plight of those making the perilous crossing. The migrants fell victim to a familiar chain of misfortunes: They were exploited by people-smuggling networks that stretched from their countries of origin to the coast of Libya. With the threat of violence, they were forced onto an overcrowded, unseaworthy, ill-equipped boat. The ship that took them to their deaths was stranded for days on its intended journey to Italy without help, despite apparent distress calls made by the migrants. And they endured this all in a desperate attempt to find asylum on a continent whose governments have failed to come up with a collective plan on migration and where many locals would rather push them back into the sea.”

On the other end of the economic spectrum…

“Far away in the North Atlantic, a cinematic ordeal is playing out that has news media and the global public riveted. Somewhere near the famous wreck of the Titanic, a deep-sea submersible is missing. At the time of writing, the search for the 21-foot craft, known as the Titan, was entering its fourth day after it lost contact with Canadian research vessel Polar Prince on Sunday morning. The U.S. Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Air Force had scrambled to locate the submersible over a vast 10,000-square mile search zone in the ocean, which reaches 13,000 feet deep in some areas.

The Titan was carrying out a dive organized by OceanGate Expeditions, a private research and tourism company that has conducted trips to the Titanic wreck site. Its passengers reportedly pay $250,000 a head to go on the journey. Though the names of those on board had not been released by authorities, reporting confirmed that British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush were inside the Titan. So too were Shahzada Dawood, heir to one of Pakistan’s biggest private fortunes, and his teenage son Suleman.

Over 27,000 migrants have gone missing and are presumed dead in the Mediterranean since 2014. In general, no US or NATO aircraft or naval vessels scramble to locate and rescue the migrants before their ships go down and even after the tragedy unfolds, “search and rescue” efforts don’t begin to match the efforts made for the 5 who we now know died on the Titan. The mainstream media doesn’t follow the tragedies which take the lives of the poor, again and again. They are expendable, or worse, undesirable.

Both events are terrible tragedies but of very different magnitudes, The response says a lot about our society and those of our allies and friends in Europe. And this is not alone in laying bare the underlying racism and class bias of Western nations and media.

For another excellent analysis of this "Tale of Two Disasters” from the American Prospect, check out  https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-06-23-tale-of-two-disasters/

 

 

A better world is possible, but only If we keep our eyes on the prize

 As many of my readers know, I am an activist member of the Democratic Socialist of America here in Wilmington, NC. I was unable to attend the recent "How We Win" conference sponsored by the DSA, The Nation, and Jacobin, but was particularly impressed by the following summation by Michael Kazin, which I am posting in its entirety. 

The article (and the underlying position of most of the DSA as far as I can see) follows the same conceptual framework as the modern abolitionist movement; what we, as socialists, are doing is building a movement towards a socialist horizon. We have, and must always maintain, a vision of what a better world will look like, and insist that what we support in our struggle today must be consistent with building toward that vision. 

Having recently returned from a delegation to Cuba, it is clear to me that the leadership of their revolutionary government has that vision; I could see it in everything we learned about while we were there. That is why we, who live in the "belly of the beast", must support the Cuban people and work to end the US blockade.

This vision is what Marx and Engels talked about in the Communist Manifesto 175 years ago, when they wrote that our task is to "represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present". We must understand that while we fight for ourselves and our class today, we are laying the ground work for the struggles of our children and our children's children for a better world. In the words of the FRELIMO, the Mozambique Liberation Movement, A luta continua, vitória é certa.

The Socialist Emergence Inside the Democratic Tradition by Michael Kazin, from the American Prospect, June 21, 2023

“Labels get in the way sometime,” remarked Dylan Wegela, a first-term state representative from Michigan. The teacher and former labor organizer was responding to a question about whether his belief in democratic socialism prevents him from reaching voters in his largely white, working-class district in the suburbs west of Detroit. “I never deny I’m a socialist,” he continued, “but my community doesn’t know what it means. They do like things socialists want, though, like Medicare for All and affordable housing.”

The occasion for these reflections was “How We Win”—a conference sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Fund, The Nation, and Jacobin—held last weekend at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. The 50 or so politicians in attendance occupy elective offices in mostly blue cities and districts all over the nation. They include state senators from Brooklyn and Philadelphia, council members from Knoxville and Pittsburgh, an alderman from Chicago, the mayor of Burbank, California, and a theater director who sits on the board of education in the Riverhead School District on the east end of Long Island. It was a decidedly young crowd. I saw not a single pol with even a trace of gray or white hair, unless one includes Bernie Sanders, who briefly addressed the group via Zoom.

At times, the working conference rocked like a celebration. “This is the largest gathering of socialist elected officials in decades,” exulted Maria Svart, executive director of the DSA Fund. Happy shouts and a stamping of feet followed her statement and other speakers who echoed it. Since Sanders ran for president seven years ago, DSA has boomed to close to 100,000 members; voters have chosen more than 150 socialists to govern them at levels from the House of Representatives to that school board in Long Island. Indeed, not since the heyday of the old Socialist Party of America, more than a century ago, have there been so many victorious politicians who sport the “S-word” on their bios.

Yet, Wegela and his fellow officials devote most of their time to advocating for winnable reforms in the only system we have, not planning how to hurl the rotten machinery of capitalism into the recycling bin of history. Svart claims they all share the goal of learning “how to shift power from the owning class to the working class.” But every panel I attended discussed such practical goals as how to build and support labor unions, reduce the fear of crime, persuade Latinos to spurn right-wing candidates, and stop cities from financing lavish sports arenas. Every official who attended, I believe, had run as either a Democrat or in a nonpartisan contest. I heard no one mention launching a radical third party or backing any of the marginal ones that exist and are running self-described democratic socialist candidates for president next year. During the conference, “socialist” got mentioned almost exclusively as a term of self-identification rather than as the goal toward which all were striving.

The current surge of elected DSA members, while modest, would not have occurred unless socialists ran as Democrats.

The ideological ancestors to this new generation of socialist elected officials defined themselves and their work rather differently. The nearly 1,000 American socialists who got elected to office in the early 20th century ran as the nominees of a party of that name, which proudly belonged to an international socialist movement that was much larger in Western and Central Europe and was growing all over the industrial world. Like their 21st-century comrades, they tried to deliver on the promise of a government that would curb the powers of corporations and the rich and serve the interests of ordinary people. The so-called “sewer socialists” who ran cities like Milwaukee, Berkeley, and Schenectady, New York, instituted factory inspections, built new hospitals and schools and parks in working-class neighborhoods, and prevented the police from aiding employers during strikes.

But they were quite forthright about the limits of what they believed those reforms could accomplish. When Eugene Debs, a former Democratic state assemblyman and union leader, accepted his party’s nomination for president in 1912, he declared, “The Socialist Party is organized and financed by the workers themselves as a means of wresting control of government and of industry from the capitalists and making the working class the ruling class of the nation and the world. Since the socialist revolution cannot be achieved in a day, never for a moment mistake reform for revolution and never lose sight of the ultimate goal.” That year, 19 Socialists held office in the state of Michigan alone.

The current surge of elected DSA members, while modest, would not have occurred unless socialists ran as Democrats, a process Sanders began when he nearly beat Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination in 2016. But that affiliation does raise a question: How does a progressive Democrat who identifies as a socialist differ from a progressive Democrat, like so many in the current party, who does not, when their stances on the key economic and cultural issues are identical or nearly so?

Participants in “How We Win,” a conference sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Fund, The Nation, and Jacobin, gathered last weekend in Washington.

At the end of the “How We Win” conference, a few panelists did suggest an answer. I had to leave early, but David Duhalde, chair of the Fund, a veteran DSA activist, and organizer of the meeting, summed up their arguments in an email: “We are building for a world where democratic socialism is possible, and that democratic socialism is impossible absent political power.” He adds, “The socialist identity is key to show our long-term vision and … counter-intuitively attenuate the effects of some types of red baiting. You can’t accuse someone of being a socialist when they are open about it!”

In the past, American socialists made their most valuable contributions as dedicated, shrewd, and uncorruptible organizers of mass insurgencies, not by dreaming out loud about a revolution to come. Their work was indispensable to the growth of and the gains achieved by the movements for Black and immigrant rights, feminism, organized labor, and more. Most of the socialists at the D.C. conference entered politics through contemporary movements, too. While in office, they continue to employ the kind of methods that succeed outside the electoral realm. “You have to knock on people’s doors not just before elections but all through the year,” advised Phara Forrest, a member of the New York State Assembly who is also a registered nurse. “You have to teach people how to organize themselves.” As two young socialists named Karl and Friedrich put it in a manifesto 175 years ago: The task is to “represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present.”

To expand their influence, the comrades now serving in office and those who follow them may have to be content to regard their ultimate aim the way many a Christian thinks about the Second Coming. As Irving Howe and Lewis Coser wrote 70 years ago in one of the first issues of Dissent: “Socialism is the name of our desire … the desire arises from a conflict with, and an extension from, the world that is; nor could the desire survive in any meaningful way were it not for this complex relationship to the world that is.”

Meanwhile, there is a good deal of vital work to get done, and many elections to win.

 

Solidarity with the Cuban People - End the Blockade!

Below I have reprinted a reflection from another solidarity delegation to Cuba (sponsored by CodePink) earlier this year. It focuses on the economic consequences of the US blockade for the Cuban people, in particular the shortages of fuel.

The delegation that I was on experienced fewer issues with power (only one short outage in the 9 days we were there) despite being housed in a working-class community a good distance from the tourist hotels. But we did see long lines at the gas stations and heard about the effects that lack of fertilizer had on agricultural production. By the way, the Cubans are working towards sustainable food production by focusing on small scale organic farming (we visited one of the farms), an economic plus (they don’t need to pay for importing fertilizers) and an environment plus at the same time. The Cubans are planning for the future and working to get there, poco a poco.

I have edited the article for brevity and included a few comments of my own (in Italics).

 

The fuel shortages in Cuba

Cubans on the island are charting their own course outside U.S. hegemony and it is clear that the U.S.’s policy is to try and deny them that right. 

By Kaitlin Blanchard and Eli Smith, June 15, 2023, Nation of Change

One hundred and fifty young people from the United States and Canada arrived in Cuba in late April 2023, just days before International Workers Day. As members of CODEPINK’s youth cohort, our goal was to understand the Cuban political system, the U.S. blockade and its impacts on everyday life. We sat in a room upon our arrival, listening to our trip hosts explain the issue of fuel shortages on the island. Before they were done talking, the microphones went silent. The power had gone out.

In 1960, following the Cuban Revolution that propelled Fidel Castro to power, a memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs was written and later declassified. It stated that a majority of Cubans supported Fidel, and if the U.S. wanted to counter the rise of communism in its backyard, it would have to deny “money and supplies to Cuba, decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation, and an overthrow of the government.” 

The U.S. imposed a blockade (over 60 years ago) which still restricts necessary items from entering Cuba and prevents other countries from selling them to the island. On top of the embargo, the Biden Administration keeps Cuba on a state-sponsor of terrorism list, further restricting economic development. The goal of these policies is explicit in the 1960 memorandum: the US is trying to starve socialism out of Cuba.

And we certainly saw misery with our own eyes. Usually for May Day, millions of Cubans rally in Havana, celebrating socialism and workers. May Day was scaled down this year due to fuel shortages (which restricted transportation Havana from around the country) – Cuba has to conserve the fuel it has for farming and other necessities. (When I was there in 1972, we attended the May Day rally of over 700,000 Cubans, many bussed in from rural areas around the country, to hear Fidel speak about the progress of the revolution and the plans for the future.)

Leading up to May Day, a massive storm swept through the island, causing emergencies that the Cuban government couldn’t effectively deal with because of the lack of fuel. We sat through multiple power outages, even in a hotel that had decent fuel access. We toured neighborhoods in transformation, learning how Cubans were developing their own communities to have better access to medical care, food and other life affirming services. Even those tours, full of hope and self-determination, were plagued by outages. Tourism is a huge industry that helps sustain the Cuban economy, so tourists like us are usually shielded from occurrences like this.

Even though the people we met in Cuba had a thorough understanding of what our country was doing to theirs, they welcomed us with open arms. Not only were they kind to us, they were also hopeful for the kind of future we would build together—one where our two countries can base foreign policy on the person-to-person relationships we build rather than deferring to the dinosaurs in Washington who value the victory of their ideologies over millions of Cuban lives.

Our cohort visited the Blas Roca Contingent where we were warmly welcomed with fresh coconuts, t-shirts, and hats. We joined delegations from all over the world: Switzerland, Australia, Uruguay, Panama, just to name a few. It was amazing to see union leaders and organizers from all over the world come to Cuba to show support for the Cuban project. It was also transformative to see how well Cuban workers are taken care of. The entire facility we were in was a place for the workers and their entire families to come for food, community, and fun.

These observations directly parallel what I had seen in its infancy in 1972 in a farmers’ co-op in Alamar, where our Venceremos Brigade worked building some of the first homes for the campesinos in the region. These sturdy prefab concrete homes were replacing the thatched roof, dirt floor “huts” that were destroyed every time a hurricane hit the area. Alamar now has upwards of 100,000 residents.

Later, a smaller group of us took a tour with a worker at the facility. He told us how his father had grown up very poor before the revolution and how much his family’s life changed for the better after the revolution. He spoke of the hardships of the blockade, especially not having access to fertilizers for farming which could easily double their yields. He also mentioned how he has had family emigrate to the U.S. and while he doesn’t fault them for leaving, he himself could never leave the Cuban revolutionary project behind. He is a revolutionary through and through. His story is the kind that the policy makers in the U.S. choose to ignore. Cubans on the island are charting their own course outside U.S. hegemony and it is clear that the U.S.’s policy is to try and deny them that right. 

All of us, like the delegations that have gone before us and the countless ones who will go after, returned to the U.S. with a deeply held commitment to end our country’s blockade on the Cuban people.

 

Why is Cuba on the the list of "state sponsors of terrorism"?

 

The US government maintains a list of countries that it accuses of sponsoring terrorism. Cuba, a small island country (population around 11 million) which has no weapons industry, no navy or air force to speak of, and NO nuclear weapons, is on that list. 

Cuba is on that list even though it does not have military bases abroad. Even though it hasn’t invaded another country recently (actually, now that I think about it, it hasn’t ever invaded another country). It does send some of its citizens abroad, but they are doctors and other medical professionals, who are assisting mostly poor nations in dealing with health crises. The “weapons” they carry don’t wipe out wedding parties, but disease. 

It has a large University dedicated to training family doctors from countries around the world. And it has sent teachers to other poor countries, bringing weapons like books and knowledge, both of which are considered subversive by many in the US.

But still, according to the last two presidential administrations, Cuba is a state sponsor of terrorism. What is it about the revolutionary government of Cuba that spreads terror in the highest circles of the US government and the wealthy power that dominates our politics? 

Is it the example of a country that has resisted every attempt of the US to reassert control for over 60 years? Is it the example of how under socialism, a government can focus resources (resources that are extremely limited because of a 500 history of exploitation by other countries and by a 60+ year embargo by the US) and respond to crisis after crisis and still continue its work towards that better world that the generation of revolutionaries fought and died for. 

But enough about Cuba. What about the country that accuses Cuba if being a state sponsor of terrorism. A country that has sponsored an invasion of Cuba; that has planned and attempted hundreds of assassinations against Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro; a country that supported direct terrorist attacks against both Cuban and US citizens who support the revolution including the downing of passenger planes and sabotaging vessels in Cuban ports. 

A country that invades other countries based on made up “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction, a country that has military bases in some 80 different countries and claims the “right” to intervene anywhere in the world to protect its interests ($$$), which it calls “a rules-based international order.”

Cuba has a museum that I visited called the Museum of the Denouncement. In two floors and a dozen or more exhibits it documents the terrorist attacks against Cuba, planned, executed and supported by the United States government during the last 63 years. The United States does not have a similar museum for the support of terrorism by Cuba, because its halls would be empty, its exhibits nonexistent.

We, who live in the belly of the beast, need to demand that the US remove Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. Maybe in its place on the list, we could put the name of the real supporter of terrorism and build a Museum of Denouncement of our own. I have the ideal building for such a museum, which would have to be very, very large. It’s a five-sided building just across the Potomac from the nation’s capital. It probably already houses most of the documents we would need.

 

What if?

What if I told you there was a place, say a country, where comprehensive, preventative health care from conception to the grave is provided to all citizens, regardless of wealth, race, gender, gender identification, or any other status? Sounds interesting? Guessing as to what country it is? Let me eliminate some candidates. It’s not a country in Western Europe and obviously it’s not the United States.

Let’s add a few things. In this place, there are family doctors in every community, charged with providing basic care to everyone in that community. And let’s say that these doctors live and work in those communities, and not in some far away gated community.

At this point we need to add that this care is free. No copays, no hidden charges, just part of your social benefits, a right, like the right to free speech or the right to marry whomever you please (which I might add is guaranteed in this country).

By now you might be thinking that I’m making this up. There is no place on earth where this is possible. Think again. I sitting there right now composing this record.

But I’m not done. Some other unbelievable, but verifiable, information. Up until a few years ago, this country of fewer than 10 million people was economically undeveloped, having been exploited by the Global North for some 500 years, with its land decimated in the interests of the profits of a few. But despite this it was able to create its own successful vaccines to combat COVID with no help from big Pharma, and it then proceeded to vaccinate its entire population.

And despite its small size and the domestic needs it has, it sends medical teams around the world to help other people when disaster strikes (or just when they could use assistance in fighting disease) because it believes that we are really one race - the human race - and that it is everyone’s duty to act as our brothers’ keepers.

No, this is not some country where a religious group has taken control and promoted charity as the way to heaven. Again, while individuals in this country are free to practice their religion, many do not. Instead, it could be said that they have answered a higher calling, solidarity, not just with ones’ clan, or ones’ nation, but with everyone, everywhere, all at once.

It’s time for me to come clean. I’m sitting at the Centro de MLK in sunny Havana, Cuba.

I’m sure you are thinking that I’ve left out a lot and that Cuba is not the workers’ paradise I’ve just painted. And I agree. The country and the people face many problems, all of which are made qualitatively worse by the actions of the United States, which for 63 years has been intent on overthrowing the revolution which freed the country from US domination.

But, in this one area it is abundantly clear that the movement which began as a nationalist revolt against foreign domination and morphed into a full-scale socialist revolution, has achieved something truly remarkable. What else could it achieve if the US would end its blockade and allow Cuba to continue its progress?

Undoubtedly that is something that economic and political power in the US is deathly afraid of. A small country on its doorstep would set an example for others to follow, liberating themselves from the US imperialism and working together to build a new world from the ashes of the old.

For those of us who live in the belly of the beast, our task is clear. Build the movement in solidarity with the Cuban people, end the blockade and unleash the power of ordinary people to fight for a better world. “We have nothing to lose but our chains”

Addendum: After returning home, I was surprised to encounter the following article in, of all places, the Washington Post. It captures is a few short paragraphs, the different approaches of US capitalism and Cuban socialism to healthcare. Even more importantly, it demonstrates how “the United States’ age-old embargo is hurting not just Cuba. It’s hurting the world.”

Next pandemic, let Cuba vaccinate the world

By Achal Prabhala and Vitor Ido, June 1, 2023

How can humanity prevent the next pandemic from being as disastrous as this one, in which as many as 15 million people have died? This past week, countries of the World Health Organization met in Geneva to begin debating a pandemic preparedness accord. A primary aim is to quickly develop new cures and vaccines, and the capacity to deliver them to everyone on the planet.

While no one yet knows what the WHO will ultimately recommend, it’s possible to predict one thing it will not: easing U.S. sanctions on Cuba’s homegrown biotech industry, which has the wherewithal to develop cutting-edge vaccines and treatments and share them with countries unable to afford first-world pharmaceutical companies’ premium prices.

This is a mistake.

During the covid-19 crisis, the United States had the opportunity to share its vaccine technology with the world, and its failure to do so prolonged the pandemic at home and abroad. In June 2022, a senior Biden administration official admitted that the omicron variant, which has been responsible for more than 300,000 deaths in the United States and more than 1.5 million globally, might never have emerged if the world been sufficiently vaccinated in 2021.

What is less known is that Cuba had the same opportunity to help vaccinate the world. The story of how Cuba was systematically blocked in its quest to make its own highly effective vaccines widely available offers crucial lessons.

The most recent chapter of this story began in summer 2021. The delta variant was ravaging India and making its way around the world. New vaccines offered hope, but the most under-resourced countries could not get them for love or money. While the United States and Europe donated doses, their efforts were hardly enough to solve the global problem. Crucially, these governments could not persuade the companies they had financed to share the technologies that could have enabled other countries to make vaccines on their own. In this grim landscape, it was astonishing to learn that Cuba had made two effective coronavirus vaccines from scratch, and then vowed to share its intellectual property worldwide.

“We realized we wouldn’t have the money to buy vaccines for our people, so we had to make our own, and we had to do it in a very short time,” Rolando Pérez Rodríguez, the director of science and innovation at BioCubaFarma, told us recently. In August 2021, one of BioCubaFarma’s laboratories also produced a booster. Both demonstrated more than 90 percent efficacy, on par with the leading Western vaccines.

The cost of developing these shots was $50 million, according to BioCubaFarma, far less than the billions invested by the U.S. government and the hundreds of millions invested by Germany in theirs.

Remarkably, Cuba eventually exported almost as many vaccine doses as it used at home, supplying Venezuela, Mexico, Vietnam, Syria, Nicaragua, Belarus and Iran. But while many countries in Africa and South Asia also desperately needed vaccines, they did not take advantage of Cuba’s offer.

To explain why they did not, we must go back to 1962, when the U.S. economic embargo against Cuba went into effect. Since then, escalating sanctions, which the United States has enforced by applying steady political and financial pressure, have isolated Cuba not just from America but also effectively the world. Stiff penalties for violating U.S. sanctions have ensured that institutions and governments routinely over-comply with them.

Cuba could have asked the WHO to certify its vaccines to make it easier for other countries to buy them with international aid. But it couldn’t afford to engage with the WHO after President Donald Trump not only reversed the mild sanctions reforms introduced by his predecessor, but also designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism. This has meant that, even in countries where it is legal to transact with Cuba, few banks are willing to risk hefty fines and criminal sanctions for being perceived as supporting terrorism.

Cuban-American relations are a political live wire, but new times call for new measures. The world has changed since 1962. The specter haunting it today is not communism but another global health emergency. There is little indication that the Biden administration will pressure U.S. pharmaceutical companies to share their medical inventions with the world. But President Biden could take a giant step toward global health security by rolling back the Trump administration’s draconian Cuba policies. If he went further by allowing for new exceptions in the U.S. sanctions regime, then Cuba could keep developing — and sharing — innovative vaccines and treatments for the world’s diseases.

More than three years on, it’s obvious that the world reacted poorly to the onset of the coronavirus, that lives were unnecessarily lost. But there is time now to prepare for the next pandemic, to set a course toward a more equitable distribution of medical technologies. The United States’ age-old embargo is hurting not just Cuba. It’s hurting the world.

Achal Prabhala is the coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. Vitor Ido is a program officer in the Health, Intellectual Property and Biodiversity Program at the South Centre in Geneva.

 

 

That Other War - Yemen, Ukraine and Forever War

 A quick comparison:

On May 3, 2023 the U.N. human rights agency says it has confirmed 23,375 casualties in Ukraine — including 8,709 civilians killed ...

At the same time, according to the UN, over 150,000 people have been killed in the fighting in Yemen, as well as an estimate of more than 227,000 dead as a result of an ongoing famine and lack of healthcare facilities due to the war. The vast majority of the dead are civilians.

And the prospects for an end to the conflicts? In Yemen, “everybody directly or indirectly involved — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Houthis, China, Oman, Qatar, Jordan, etc. — appears to want to put the war behind them. A ceasefire has held for more than a year, and peace talks are advancing with real momentum, including prisoner exchanges and other positive expressions of diplomacy. Yet the U.S. appears very much not to want the war to end.”

“The U.S. seems to be attempting to slow-walk and blow up the peace talks. Triggering a resumption of hostilities would unleash yet another Saudi-led bombing campaign that could win U.S. proxies better terms when it comes to control of the strategically positioned Yemeni coastline. (The Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden link the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean at the southwestern corner of Yemen, an area so geopolitically important to the flow of oil and international traffic that the U.S. has one of its largest bases, in Djibouti, across the strait.)”

Continuing the blockade of humanitarian aid to Yemen until the US conditions for peace are met will result in thousands more civilian deaths.

Hassan El-Tayyab, legislative director for Middle East policy for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said the U.S. rhetoric makes him nervous. “I’m very concerned that the administration is adding all these conditions to a full U.S. military exit and a Saudi-Houthi deal… The U.S. has no business dictating terms of what peace should look like. ‘Yemenis should be allowed to chart their own future. It increasingly seems like the Biden administration would rather slow down diplomatic progress instead of finally just ending the Saudi-Houthi conflict.” (All quotes are from The Intercept)

 

Back to the “unprovoked” War in Ukraine

I have previously written about the back story of the war, which should make it very, very clear that this war was NOT unprovoked. This doesn’t justify the brutal Russian invasion, but should provide some understanding of what the US should do to facilitate negotiations between the Ukrainians and the Russians to end the war. That is, of course, if the US really wants to end the war.

Add in what’s happening in the Middle East with regard to the war in Yemen and with US/Israeli actions with regard to Iran, the ongoing US/NATO provocations of China in the Pacific (more about that later), and the massive increases in the Pentagon war budget, one can only conclude that the bipartisan political leadership in the US is resorting to a strategy of “forever war” in its efforts to maintain US hegemony around the world.

In light of that, I’m posting an article by noted economist, Jeffery Sachs, which unveils the back story of the war in more detail and with more background that I had available in my original piece.

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace, Jeffery Sachs, from Common Dreams

“George Orwell wrote in 1984 that "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." Governments work relentlessly to distort public perceptions of the past. Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

“Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion. A far better approach for Russia might have been to step up diplomacy with Europe and with the non-Western world to explain and oppose U.S. militarism and unilateralism. In fact, the relentless U.S. push to expand NATO is widely opposed throughout the world, so Russian diplomacy rather than war would likely have been effective.

The Biden team uses the word “unprovoked” incessantly, most recently in Biden’s major speech on the first-year anniversary of the war, in a recent NATO statement, and in the most recent G7 statement. Mainstream media friendly to Biden simply parrot the White House. The New York Times is the lead culprit, describing the invasion as “unprovoked” no fewer than 26 times, in five editorials, 14 opinion columns by NYT writers, and seven guest op-eds!

There were in fact two main U.S. provocations. The first was the U.S. intention to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia in order to surround Russia in the Black Sea region by NATO countries (Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Turkey, and Georgia, in counterclockwise order). The second was the U.S. role in installing a Russophobic regime in Ukraine by the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014. The shooting war in Ukraine began with Yanukovych’s overthrow nine years ago, not in February 2022 as the U.S. government, NATO, and the G7 leaders would have us believe.

Biden and his foreign policy team refuse to discuss these roots of the war. To recognize them would undermine the administration in three ways. First, it would expose the fact that the war could have been avoided, or stopped early, sparing Ukraine its current devastation and the U.S. more than $100 billion in outlays to date. Second, it would expose President Biden’s personal role in the war as a participant in the overthrow of Yanukovych, and before that as a staunch backer of the military-industrial complex and very early advocate of NATO enlargement. Third, it would push Biden to the negotiating table, undermining the administration’s continued push for NATO expansion.

The archives show irrefutably that the U.S. and German governments repeatedly promised to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch eastward” when the Soviet Union disbanded the Warsaw Pact military alliance. Nonetheless, U.S. planning for NATO expansion began early in the 1990s, well before Vladimir Putin was Russia’s president. In 1997, national security expert Zbigniew Brzezinski spelled out the NATO expansion timeline with remarkable precision.

U.S. diplomats and Ukraine’s own leaders knew well that NATO enlargement could lead to war. The great US scholar-statesman George Kennan called NATO enlargement a “fateful error,” writing in the New York Times that, “Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry considered resigning in protest against NATO enlargement. In reminiscing about this crucial moment in the mid-1990s, Perry said the following in 2016: “Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy ... but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”

In 2008, then U.S. Ambassador to Russia, and now CIA Director, William Burns, sent a cable to Washington warning at length of grave risks of NATO enlargement: “Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

Ukraine’s leaders knew clearly that pressing for NATO enlargement to Ukraine would mean war. Former Zelensky advisor Oleksiy Arestovych declared in a 2019 interview “that our price for joining NATO is a big war with Russia.”

During 2010-2013, Yanukovych pushed neutrality, in line with Ukrainian public opinion. The U.S. worked covertly to overthrow Yanukovych, as captured vividly in the tape of then U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt planning the post-Yanukovych government weeks before the violent overthrow of Yanukovych. Nuland makes clear on the call that she was coordinating closely with then Vice President Biden and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan, the same Biden-Nuland-Sullivan team now at the center of U.S. policy vis-à-vis Ukraine.

After Yanukovych’s overthrow, the war broke out in the Donbas, while Russia claimed Crimea. The new Ukrainian government appealed for NATO membership, and the U.S. armed and helped restructure the Ukrainian army to make it interoperable with NATO. In 2021, NATO and the Biden Administration strongly recommitted to Ukraine’s future in NATO.

In the immediate lead-up to Russia’s invasion, NATO enlargement was center stage. Putin’s draft US-Russia Treaty (December 17, 2021) called for a halt to NATO enlargement. Russia’s leaders put NATO enlargement as the cause of war in Russia’s National Security Council meeting on February 21, 2022. In his address to the nation that day, Putin declared NATO enlargement to be a central reason for the invasion.

Historian Geoffrey Roberts recently wrote: “Could war have been prevented by a Russian-Western deal that halted NATO expansion and neutralized Ukraine in return for solid guarantees of Ukrainian independence and sovereignty? Quite possibly.” In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine reported progress towards a quick negotiated end to the war based on Ukraine’s neutrality. According to Naftali Bennett, former Prime Minister of Israel, who was a mediator, an agreement was close to being reached before the U.S., U.K., and France blocked it.

While the Biden administration declares Russia’s invasion to be unprovoked, Russia pursued diplomatic options in 2021 to avoid war, while Biden rejected diplomacy, insisting that Russia had no say whatsoever on the question of NATO enlargement. And Russia pushed diplomacy in March 2022, while the Biden team again blocked a diplomatic end to the war.

By recognizing that the question of NATO enlargement is at the center of this war, we understand why U.S. weaponry will not end this war. Russia will escalate as necessary to prevent NATO enlargement to Ukraine. The key to peace in Ukraine is through negotiations based on Ukraine’s neutrality and NATO non-enlargement. The Biden administration’s insistence on NATO enlargement to Ukraine has made Ukraine a victim of misconceived and unachievable U.S. military aspirations. It’s time for the provocations to stop, and for negotiations to restore peace to Ukraine.

May 23, 2023  Common Dreams

A Final Note

It is important to remember when looking at a particular event, that everything is interconnected. Isolating the war in Ukraine and denying its back story keeps us from find the way out of this quagmire. That is, if we really want to find a way out, or if forever war(s) will continue to exacerbate the policrisis in today’s world.

Them and Us - Short notes on the class struggle

 

US

After recently reading “Poverty, By America” (Matthew Desmond), I ran across the following from the Poor Peoples’ Campaign. To put it bluntly, poverty kills and it is the direct result of public policy! I quote

“Last year, we released A Poor People’s Pandemic Report: Mapping the Intersections of Race, Poverty, and COVID-19, which collected data on poverty, income, and occupation as they relate to the COVID-19 pandemic. We found that poor and low-income communities experienced higher death rates and infections of COVID-19 as a result of public policy failure to protect and support those experiencing interlocking injustices stemming from … public policy. 

“And just a few weeks ago, researchers at the University of California, Riverside identified poverty as the fourth-greatest cause of death in the United States. That means in 2019, poverty silently killed 10 times as many people as homicides. Poverty is lethal. ‘Poverty kills as much as dementia, accidents, stroke, Alzheimer's, and diabetes,’ said David Brady, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside of the study.”  - Bishop William J. Barber, II and Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis

To add to the misery, we are seeing a surge in illegal child labor. Since 2015, child labor violations have risen nearly 300%. And those are just the violations government investigators have managed to uncover and document. Companies like General Mills, Walmart and Ford have been implicated. Many of these children being exploited are undocumented immigrants and their families can’t risk speaking out. They need the money, which makes them easily exploited.

In response to this, some Republican controlled state governments are working to lower the legal age to work, even in dangerous jobs. After all, too much government regulation hurts the economy and the bottom line. As far as business is concerned, the problem is solved.

At the same time funds for public education are being slashed. Poor children, particularly Brown and Black children, obviously don’t need an education to work in the jobs waiting for them. Charles Dickens & Jacob Riis, where are you when we need you, again?

 

THEM

BlackRock Investment Management & Financial Services is the planet’s biggest investor, with $9 trillion in assets under management and an army of tech-savvy analysts trained on the scent of easy money. The corporation is second only to the U.S. and China in terms of the financial power it wields.

In search of that easy money, BlackRock is a (the?) major investor in ITA (iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense ETF). Among the dozens of companies represented in ITA are Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing—companies that profit directly from huge Pentagon spending. Lockheed Martin developed the bombs Saudi Arabia used on a Yemeni school bus full of children in 2018, and Raytheon is the contractor behind the expansion of the U.S.’ nuclear arsenal. Reason enough to divest in these “masters of war”, but moral calculation isn’t what BlackRock is about. Note: ITA shares have seen a more that 500% increase in price since 2012.

BlackRock is also the planet’s second-biggest funder of fossil fuels. The significant climate impact of these companies often goes unmentioned. By providing ballistic missiles and aerospace tech to the Pentagon, these companies fuel the latter’s carbon emissions—making the U.S. military the planet’s largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gasses, and thus a leading cause of our present climate crisis. While BlackRock’s continues to pay lip service to the severity of the climate crisis its actions are at serious odds with its “concern given the investment platforms it sells. 

In the Gilded Age of US history, when the Robber Barons ruled the economy, Populist leaders used to say that the people needed to own the banks or the banks would own the people. In today’s economy, it’s private equity (in combination with the rest of the financial sector) that is well on its way to fulfilling the later. We need to revive the call for the people to take control, since “regulation” seems to have accomplished little over the past 100+ years.

 

An Empire in Decline? – Bits and pieces of the polycrisis

 

Feeding the military/industrial complex - Ben Freeman & William D. Hartung and at TomDispatch

In 2020, Lockheed Martin received $75 billion in Pentagon contracts, more than the entire budget of the State Department and the Agency for International Development combined. This year’s spending just for that company’s overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft equals the full budget of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And as a new report from the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies revealed recently, the average taxpayer spends $1,087 per year on weapons contractors compared to $270 for K-12 education and just $6 for renewable energy”

This is most definitely NOT “defense spending”. Massive spending on a war machine does not make Americans less vulnerable to the threats of pandemics, global warming, gun violence, deaths of despair, nuclear annihilation and runaway inequality. Its purpose is NOT to defend us from real threats. To the contrary, it makes our citizens more likely to suffer from all of these other crises.

Add to this the rising demands for ”law and order” at home (except, of course, for laws on gun control) and you get a picture of a society out of control. And, with some exceptions, both political parties seem to be united behind the military approach, both home and abroad.

 

The decline of the humanities (when we need them the most) – Nick Anderson, WAPO, May 20, 2023

The number of students nationwide seeking four-year degrees in computer and information sciences and related fields shot up 34 percent from 2017 to 2022, to about 573,000, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. The English-major head count fell 23 percent in that time, to about 113,000. History fell 12 percent, to about 77,000.

In 2010, arts and humanities majors of all kinds outnumbered the computer science total at U-Md. more than 4 to 1. Now the university counts about 2,400 students majoring in arts and humanities — a collection of disciplines that fill an entire college — and about 3,300 in computer science.

Some schools have taken radical steps. Marymount University, a Catholic institution in Northern Virginia, decided in February to phase out history and English majors, citing low enrollment and a responsibility to prepare students “for the fulfilling, in-demand careers of the future.”

Technology is where the money is. The humanities and particularly teaching is where the money isn’t. Is this the kind of society we want for our children? Are we prepping for a future where AI is in control? Where algorithms that maximize, say profits, make all the decisions for us?

They call it the humanities for a reason.

 

“Danger, Will Robinson, Danger” – Adam Roberts, The Economist, May 20, 2023

“Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of,” writes Yuval Noah Harari, a historian and philosopher, in a recent By Invitation essay. Religion, human rights, money—these things are not inscribed in our DNA, and require language to make sense. In his essay, Mr. Harari poses the question: “What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures?” The answer, he believes, casts a dark cloud over the future of human civilisation.

One more crisis to add to the cascading crises we face? Is language the only thing that makes us human? Can AI learn empathy, humility and love? Will this technology turn out to be even more threatening to human existence than our dependence on fossil fuels to produce the energy necessary for industrialization? What safeguards need to be put into place, or are we willing to let unbridled capitalism make the decisions about proceeding with the further development of AI, guided only by the profit motive?

 

The polycrisis of capitalism

The evidence just keeps pouring in. When empires are in decline, they become very, very dangerous. Has the American Dream or, as Thomas Jefferson called it, the Empire of Liberty, become a nightmare for us and the rest of the world? Can those of us who are coming to understand the nature of the polycrisis of capital in the twenty-first century, bend the arc of history back toward justice? Is there any other alternative? 

To paraphrase Langston Hughes, what happens to a dream run amok? Does it dry up from a warming climate? Or fester with pandemic after pandemic? Or does it explode in a nuclear holocaust?

We need to be ringing "the fire bell in the night" - every bell, everywhere, all at once!

 

In memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

From the North Carolina Poor Peoples Campaign

On April 4, 1967, exactly one year before his tragic assassination, in his prophetic speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. named the United States Government as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. In the speech King preaches that nonviolent direct action is our greatest hope and best tool to bring about the changes we seek. King’s speech laid bare the relationship between U.S. wars abroad and the racism and poverty being challenged by the civil rights movement at home.

In this powerful speech Dr, King provides both a diagnosis and a cure that remains fully relevant today. “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.... we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” 

There is no better way to remember Dr. King than in continuing his work for social and economic justice. As he reminded us, "the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice". And, as his life's work demonstrates, our commitment justice for all is what bends it.

Who's Pushing the Nuclear Envelope and Why?

I'm reposting below an opinion piece from Nation of Change by Norman Solomon. The only thing missing is the rationale for US actions - the "defense" of it economic hegemony, which is being challenged by China and its junior partner, Russia. It's time to put all the pieces together to understand the existential polycrisis that confronts us, and by us I mean the human race, and organize the fightback here in the belly of the beast.

The announcement by Vladimir Putin over the weekend that Russia will deploy tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus marked a further escalation of potentially cataclysmic tensions over the war in neighboring Ukraine. As the Associated Press reported, “Putin said the move was triggered by Britain’s decision this past week to provide Ukraine with armor-piercing rounds containing depleted uranium.”

There’s always an excuse for nuclear madness, and the United States has certainly provided ample rationales for the Russian leader’s display of it. American nuclear warheads have been deployed in Europe since the mid-1950s, and current best estimates say 100 are there now — in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

Count on U.S. corporate media to (appropriately) condemn Putin’s announcement while dodging key realities of how the USA, for decades, has been pushing the nuclear envelope toward conflagration. The U.S. government’s breaking of its pledge not to expand NATO eastward after the fall of the Berlin Wall — instead expanding into 10 Eastern European countries — was only one aspect of official Washington’s reckless approach.

During this century, the runaway motor of nuclear irresponsibility has been mostly revved by the United States. In 2002, President George W. Bush withdrew the U.S. from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a vital agreement that had been in effect for 30 years. Negotiated by the Nixon administration and the Soviet Union, the treaty declared that its limits would be a “substantial factor in curbing the race in strategic offensive arms.”

His lofty rhetoric aside, President Obama launched a $1.7 trillion program for further developing U.S. nuclear forces under the euphemism of “modernization.” To make matters worse, President Trump pulled the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a crucial pact between Washington and Moscow that had eliminated an entire category of missiles from Europe since 1988.

The madness has remained resolutely bipartisan. Joe Biden quickly dashed hopes that he would be a more enlightened president about nuclear weapons. Far from pushing to reinstate the cancelled treaties, from the outset of his presidency Biden boosted measures like placing ABM systems in Poland and Romania. Calling them “defensive” does not change the fact that those systems can be retrofitted with offensive cruise missiles. A quick look at a map would underscore why such moves were so ominous when viewed through Kremlin windows.

Contrary to his 2020 campaign platform, President Biden has insisted that the United States must retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. His administration’s landmark Nuclear Posture Review, issued a year ago, reaffirmed rather than renounced that option. A leader of the organization Global Zero put it this way: “Instead of distancing himself from the nuclear coercion and brinkmanship of thugs like Putin and Trump, Biden is following their lead. There’s no plausible scenario in which a nuclear first strike by the U.S. makes any sense whatsoever. We need smarter strategies.”

Daniel Ellsberg — whose book The Doomsday Machine truly should be required reading in the White House and the Kremlin — summed up humanity’s extremely dire predicament and imperative when he told the New York Times days ago: “For 70 years, the U.S. has frequently made the kind of wrongful first-use threats of nuclear weapons that Putin is making now in Ukraine. We should never have done that, nor should Putin be doing it now. I’m worried that his monstrous threat of nuclear war to retain Russian control of Crimea is not a bluff. President Biden campaigned in 2020 on a promise to declare a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. He should keep that promise, and the world should demand the same commitment from Putin.”

We can make a difference — maybe even the difference — to avert global nuclear annihilation. This week, TV viewers will be reminded of such possibilities by the new documentary The Movement and the “Madman” on PBS. The film “shows how two antiwar protests in the fall of 1969 — the largest the country had ever seen — pressured President Nixon to cancel what he called his ‘madman’ plans for a massive escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam, including a threat to use nuclear weapons. At the time, protestors had no idea how influential they could be and how many lives they may have saved.”

In 2023, we have no idea how influential we can be and how many lives we might save — if we’re really willing to try.